TITS Analysis
T. Boswell
2024-10-23
TITS Analysis Overview
Well everyone, it’s the halfway point of the season. I thought it would be a fun project to look at how the season has been shaping up for the individuals. Some teams have steadily cemented themselves as title contenders. Others, like myself, have only managed to stay in the hunt. And then there’s the untouchables…The teams that haven’t quite gotten it together whose seasons might be slipping away without some miracle turnaround or spicy trade proposals. The table below provides a breakdown of the current standings.
| Team | Rank | Wins | Losses | PCT | Division |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethan | 1 | 5 | 2 | 0.714 | RGV |
| Seth | 1 | 5 | 2 | 0.714 | RGV |
| Adam | 1 | 5 | 2 | 0.714 | RGV |
| Thomas | 4 | 4 | 3 | 0.571 | RGV |
| Nick | 5 | 3 | 4 | 0.429 | RGV |
| Penner | 5 | 3 | 4 | 0.429 | RGV |
| Hannah | 1 | 6 | 1 | 0.857 | THC |
| Megan | 2 | 3 | 4 | 0.429 | THC |
| Pedro | 2 | 3 | 4 | 0.429 | THC |
| Travis | 4 | 2 | 5 | 0.286 | THC |
| Jon | 4 | 2 | 5 | 0.286 | THC |
| Walker | 6 | 1 | 6 | 0.143 | THC |
As of now, the top two division leaders make the playoffs with an additional two teams making the wild-card slot based on overall record regardless of division. We are seeing some bunching especially in the RGV with the top three teams having the same record. The top four teams in the RGV division have a better record than 5 of the 6 teams in the THC division. However, the top performer in the league so far comes from the THC division and is probably the closest to a true lock for a playoff berth (currently 98% chance of making the playoffs). Well done Hannah!
The next figures are some of my favorites. Below you will see each team’s trajectory over the first half of the season with a center line representing .500 and each tick above or below representing how many games you are above or below .500 by week.
So yeah, THC isn’t looking too
hot.
But at the start of the season there were rumblings…Do wins really matter? Isn’t points for also an important metric to consider? How should scoring be awarded and should the pot be larger per/week? Should it be larger for the winner? We are still awaiting the verdict of some of these key questions, but at this point in the season we might be able to start answering some questions.
Ranking Analysis by Method
As I mentioned earlier, our current playoff format heavily weights win/loss records and only marginally accounts for points scored via a tiebreaker. A popular format that I’ve seen adopted in some leagues is to allot two wins per week that are up for grabs: Winning your match up and scoring above the median. In this scenario, losers that still scored high, but had a tough match up, can still take home a consolation prize for that week. Total wins available would double and the perfect season would see 28 wins instead of 14 in the current format. The figure below shows what our week 7 standings would look like if we had adopted this match up win/score win format.
As of now, we don’t see a lot of variation in the RGV league. The three
at the top stay the same, Penner moves up a rank, and Nick is truly a
bottom-feeder based on this format. THC is a little more interesting.
You still see Hannah crushing it while while Megan, Travis, Walker, and
Jon meet at ranks 3 and 5. Those moving up in the rankings from left to
right might argue that their match ups have been a bit tighter. But as
of now, this hybrid format doesn’t really have much bearing on playoff
probability that I can tell. However, we better look at the hypothetical
table.
| Team | Rank | Wins | Losses | PCT | Division |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethan | 1 | 10 | 4 | 0.714 | RGV |
| Seth | 1 | 10 | 4 | 0.714 | RGV |
| Adam | 1 | 10 | 4 | 0.714 | RGV |
| Penner | 4 | 9 | 5 | 0.643 | RGV |
| Thomas | 4 | 9 | 5 | 0.643 | RGV |
| Nick | 6 | 6 | 8 | 0.429 | RGV |
| Hannah | 1 | 11 | 3 | 0.786 | THC |
| Pedro | 2 | 7 | 7 | 0.500 | THC |
| Megan | 3 | 4 | 10 | 0.286 | THC |
| Travis | 3 | 4 | 10 | 0.286 | THC |
| Walker | 5 | 2 | 12 | 0.143 | THC |
| Jon | 5 | 2 | 12 | 0.143 | THC |
The current beneficiary of the hybrid format is Pedro who now holds the lone number 2 spot in the THC division, with Travis and Megan now jockeying for that potential wildcard berth(but really the RGV division is still the clear front runner for the two wildcard slots).
One more thing just for fun is to look at how standings change week to week, but this plot is a little messier.
The first plot above (with colors) just shows the rank changes from week 1 to week 7 using the traditional format. The other two small-multiples plots show how rankings differ between the traditional and hybrid formats each week. Probably not any more illuminating than the first ones, but I made them so they are there.
Scoring Analysis
I’m moving now to looking at how the league is performing generally with scoring, how the top scorers have turned those scores into wins, and how tough the matchups have been for the winners (and losers). So first I’ll show a box (box and whisker) plot that shows how well the teams have performed from week to week.
The box and whisker plot is a decent way to show a lot of information about our scoring distribution. The line within each box is the scoring median. You’ll see that our league has hovered between the 110 and 120 mark most weeks. Week 5 had the highest scoring median as well as bunching at the 1st and 3 quartile, but we still had outliers in week 5 - Ethan and Nick. I’ll let you guess which dots represent which teams. Funny fact, they played each other that week. Another crazy coincidence is week 4. They weren’t playing eachother, but the two outliers are…you guessed it…Ethan and Nick.
The next graphs I’ll show you are separated by winners and losers. The y axis is the team’s score and the x axis is the opponents score. The size of the circle represents the difference between the scores. I want to improve these graphs a bit, but I’ll save that for an end of season thing probably. What we’d hope to understand from these plots is whether high scores were needed to win a matchup and by what margins winners and losers secured their results.
Not sure how illuminating this graph is without team label, but there is a barrier at the bottom right corner that just would be impossible to fill because that would mean you lost your matchup and this is filtered out by winners. Dots closer to the top left corner are winners who outscored their opponents substantially, but also scored highly themselves. Dots appearing closer to the right top quadrant scored well, but had tough matchups so they really needed those scores. Then dots in the bottom left corner are lower scorers that faced even lower scoring oponents. I think I’ll add a line to show the average of the median score to set up the quadrants more clearly. The dot in the very bottom left corner is just a terrible game all around (it was Thomas (me) and Jon :/)
And finally for now. I’ll show you the score rankings each week from 1-12. The fun thing about this graph is you can see where top scorers may have lost their matchup and where lowe scorers also won their matchup.
